Ise Does It - Day 4
08.11.24
25Km
For those that were wondering, because I know you were, success came my way. Although I should warn you: one pink pill was too few, and three — you might say — were too many. I’m still waiting for the promised improvements to my complexion, however.
Also: fuck me, I am dog tired tonight. A good tired. A tired that comes from an early start, good walking, good conversation and serendipitous stop for coffee with an Ayu fisherman and his wife.
We were closing in on the end of the day, hoping to walk an extra five-to-ten kilometres so that tomorrow, a 23Km day might run a little shorter. Kalia and I had been deep in conversation when I realised that I’d missed the turnoff to a forested section of the trail.
As we backtracked, we passed an old man working on his fishing nets and Kalia said “I bet he’d make a for a great portrait”. The light was perfect, his nets glinting gently in the open door of his shed. Google translate in hand, I approached to ask for permission to take his photo.
Next thing you know, his wife pulls up in their tiny Honda truck — fresh home from doing the shopping — and invites, nay almost drags, us in for coffee and, it turns out, some of the Ayu fish that her husband had caught. She served them with shreds of the most perfectly sweet pickled onions and small cups of Japanese coffee that we drank with sugar.
Google translate struggled a little with her husband’s diction but we learned that he was 83, was the director of a network of car dealerships that now sells 50 billion yen of cars a year, that he’d been to 60 countries, and had visted Sydney and Brisbane to fish. When I asked him which country he liked the most, he laughed and said simply, and in English: Japan. His wife was so proud of him, so proud of their house and garden and the table and chairs he’d built and at which we all sat.
Historically I’ve been afraid to approach strangers, but had I not asked to take this man’s photo, this magic little moment would have passed us by. I’m starting to get the sense that if I come to people from a place of curiosity and a desire for connection, I might actually get what I want. It’ll be interesting to see how the inevitable first rejection registers in my body.
We made our first big climb today across the Misesaka Tōge pass. At the base, a box of bear bells was left waiting for folk just like us along with a warning about recent bear attacks. Everyone has been warning us about bear attacks so we attached the little bells to our bags and started the steep climb. There was something meditative about how their atonal sound shifted with each step and strike of the clapper against the bell’s lip or its run around it. When I paused to take a breath, I could hear Kalia’s ringing out through the cedar trees bellow me. It was one of those moments, where time stops and I experience something like pure presence.
Hungry after the pass and newly-able to add more food to my gastrointestinal tract, we stopped by a cafe not far past the Takihara-no-Miya Shrine which we’d just visited. Run by a couple in their 40s, it was a surprising bubble of cosmopolitan Japanese cafe culture in the otherwise sleepy village of Takihara. Desperate for some fibre any which way I could get it, I ordered smoothie made with strawberries sourced from local farms. And desperate for a little indulgence after so much asceticism, I ordered their homemade cheesecake, too. Delighted doesn’t cover it.
From there on, it was mostly highway and village walking, made a little easier by Kalia’s offer to carry my iPad and electronics kit. I wouldn’t have thought shifting two kilos out of my bag would have made much of a difference, but the fact that we covered 26 kilometres in total today suggests otherwise.
So what news of the internal dialogues? A topic that I’ve been tossing around is narcissism and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which I express some kind of superiority over someone important in my life. The exploration was prompted by a podcast on how to fight well and one of the hosts said that when he saw through his narcissism and stopped believing the story that he was superior to his partner, it totally transformed how they fight and, by turns, the depth of their connection.
Out of the blue the other day, Kalia asked the darnedest question: “So how are you superior to this person?” and I was struck dumb: I wasn’t… I mean, I’m not. I can’t be, as much as the voice in my head — the sum total of all my negative patterns that chatters away darkly in the back of my mind — wants me to be.
As for why this particular quirk of psychology exists, I can see now that it emerged as a protective mechanism. As a badly-bullied kid who didn’t have an ounce of physical fight in him, I went for whatever sort of intellectual or rhetorical superiority I could muster. You know, pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword shit. It was my way of trying to regain an advantage over a bully who was usually strong but not as smart as I could make myself out to be. Thing is, I soon learned to deploy this weapon anytime I felt threatened. I still remember (and now wince at) a teenage argument with my mum where I wielded it against her and I’ll never forget what she said to me at its conclusion, tears in her eyes: “Your tongue cuts like a knife”. Yeah… it does.
So anyway, a good day all told. Movement: bowel, body and soul. Food: cheesecake, Ayu, and curry udon. A few good piccies and some lovely words of support from people near and far (THANK YOU!).
Now? Sleep.